AUDIO OVERDRIVE
CHRIS HUELSBECK EXPLAINS HOW HE OVERCLOCKED OLD MACHINES
How were you able to get sampled speech into
Turrican?
To get voice samples in there was extremely challenging. We did fragments and then pieced them together again with my sound-programming language.
I had a system where every note or sound effect was actually triggering a small script – I called them ‘sound macros’. And they enabled me to do things like splicing together voices. So, for example, for ‘Power Up’ and ‘1-Up’, the ‘Up’ would be a separate sample, and then we would reuse that. It was a way of combining samples to keep the memory footprint low.
Did you do the voices yourself?
I know I did that intro voice of Turrican I. I didn’t know that until a few months ago when Julian reminded me that I recorded that myself!
How did you create seven sound channels on the Amiga for
Turrican II?
Jochen Hippel was doing really great stuff on the Atari ST, including writing a sound driver that would emulate the Amiga sound chip. The main part was a sample mixer that would use the CPU to create the four Amiga voices. Then I thought, ‘Hey, what if I use something like that so the CPU makes four voices in one channel on the Amiga, and then keep the other three Amiga channels pristine?’ So then you could decide which sounds to play on the Cpu-mix channels, because they would lose some fidelity, and which sounds you could use the other three Amiga voices that would be untouched. So I talked to Jochen, and he graciously gave me his source code, and I ported it back to the Amiga.
What was it like working on the Mega Drive?
The Mega Drive actually had three ways of generating sound. There was an FM chip in there with six voices. Then there was the old-style PSG, which was even simpler than the C64 sound chip, but that had four channels: three kind of melody channels that would play a simple synth wave, and one channel was noise. And then the guys from Factor 5 also took the concept of sample mixing and provided two channels of simple eight-bit samples, so I could use those for drum sounds and voices and stuff like that
That was pretty innovative, because the programmer, Thomas Engel, he actually used the Z80 processor, which is usually reserved in a Mega Drive for compatibility with the Master System. And the hardware requirements from Sega actually said not to use that Z80 in conjunction with the 68000 chip. I don’t know what the reason was exactly: either they thought that the hardware couldn’t handle it, or that it would overheat. My theory is that maybe they had planned a future Mega Drive without the Z80 part, without the Master System compatibility, and they didn’t want to risk that some Mega Drive games wouldn’t play on that. But that never happened.
developing a friendly rivalry. “And that was really nice,” says Julian, “because then Holger was doing things on the Amiga which sparked Manfred, and he was like, ‘Ah, I can do that on the C64, I’ll show you this!’”
That left the final piece of the puzzle: Chris Huelsbeck’s memorable soundtrack. Julian recalls that Chris was a habitual night worker. “He got up at 6pm and then worked ’til five in the morning. And we always worked ’til midnight anyways on the game development side, so at around six, when Chris got up, I was always hanging around with him in his studio while he was tinkering around with different soundtracks.” Chris had created the score for Masterblazer, and Julian was a huge fan, so he approached him about the Turrican soundtrack. “I said, ‘Can we get one piece of music per level?’ And he said, ‘You’re crazy, that’s like 20 pieces of music!’ And I said, ‘Yes, but we want to make the greatest action game ever, so let’s do that.’”
Chris had started freelancing for Rainbow
Arts when he was still at school in the Eighties, eventually joining as an in-house composer. He says that when it came to creating the music for Turrican, he was heavily influenced by Japanese games. “At that time, I was very aware of Japanese composers and the quality of music. I really liked the playfulness and the memorable melodies. That was the kind of thing that spoke to me, because that was my own aspiration: to find really memorable melodies.” Chris envisaged the soundtrack as rock music mixed with synthesizer sounds. “I wanted it to be relatively fast-paced, so we opted to go for a rock beat,” he says, “which was faster than the usual dance-speed stuff, so more like 150 to 180 beats per minute. And that gave it that driving feel during the gameplay.”
The superb Turrican soundtrack even made it onto CD, a rarity in the Nineties. Chris released the Shades album in 1991, featuring music from Turrican and several other games he had worked on, and it was a commercial success – even though he was snubbed by record stores. “There was no interest whatsoever from the regular music industry,” he says. “But we
didn’t even really need it, because we had a connection to a game magazine that wanted to sell this for us. So right off the bat we had an order of 3,000 copies through the magazine.” Chris also took a booth at the Amiga fair in Cologne to sell CDS. “We actually sold out by the second day, we didn’t bring enough copies. So then we had to take preorders and manufacture more.” All told, Shades sold around 12,000 copies, and it was followed by a full release of the Turrican soundtrack in 1993.
But the Commodore 64 version of
Turrican was notably lacking in music. The reasons for this are threefold, says Chris.
“When Manfred worked on the C64 version, he didn’t have much CPU time left, because he was really pushing the Commodore 64 to the absolute limit. Also, I had already moved on to the Amiga, so I wasn’t actually as keen to work on the C64. And the third problem was that Manfred had very specific ideas about how he wanted the music to be.”
Julian elaborates: “Manfred had very strong ideas and a completely different musical taste from Chris. So Manfred came to Chris and basically said, ‘I want you to convert this piece of music, don’t compose your own.’ And Chris was basically, ‘Oh come on man, I can do something better.’ And so they really didn’t see eye to eye.”
Towards the end of development, says Julian, the team decided the Atari ST had a big enough base in Europe that it warranted its own version of Turrican. “Holger and Achim said, ‘Well, we know this crazy guy, Thomas Engel. He’s been doing Amiga and Atari ST, and he’s actually building our software tools. And I was like, ‘Has he ever shipped anything on the ST?’ They said, ‘No, but it can’t be that hard if it’s just a crippled Amiga.’ That was the attitude in Germany back then!”
By this stage, there was already talk of a sequel. “We already knew that we wanted to do Turrican II over the next eight months,” says Julian. “And so I told Thomas, ‘Okay, so here’s the catch. We need to get out Turrican as quickly as possible on the Atari ST, so you first need to catch up and do that, and then you have to do Turrican II so that it comes out concurrently on the ST.’ And Thomas said,
‘Fine, let’s do that.’” Thomas ended up doing a remarkable job on the Atari ST port, which came out a few months after the Amiga and
C64 versions, although Turrican’s technically demanding multidirectional scrolling meant that he couldn’t match the Amiga’s smooth 50 frames per second. “But he did it in 30fps and he didn’t cut out anything else, and that was pretty damn impressive on the ST,” notes Julian. Jochen Hippel from Thalion also did a fantastic job of converting Chris’ soundtrack by writing a program that emulated the Amiga’s sound chip (see ‘Audio Overdrive’ on page 20).
Development of the 1990 Spectrum and Amstrad CPC versions of Turrican was handled by Probe Software. But Julian is quick to point out that he and his team had nothing to do with those “horrible Turrican conversions done by Accolade”, which were released the following year. Rainbow Arts had handed over the console releases to Accolade, which contracted British developer The Code Monkeys to produce versions of Turrican for the Game Boy, Mega Drive and Turbografx-16. “We had no influence on that,” says Julian. “We were all up in arms that they didn’t tell us about even giving away the licence, and we absolutely hated that version. I mean, it was just god awful.”
When it came to making a sequel, Julian had big plans for Turrican II. “I think one of the weaknesses in Turrican was it doesn’t really push the Amiga,” he says. “And partially, that was the graphics style.” For Turrican, Manfred would design each graphical element using the C64’s limited colour palette and pixel count, then these would be transferred to the Amiga with some added detail. But for the sequel, graphics artist Andreas Escher designed each element of the Amiga version from scratch. “That’s why Turrican II looks so good on the 16-bit
“WE WERE ALL UP IN ARMS THAT THEY DIDN’T TELL US ABOUT EVEN GIVING AWAY THE LICENCE, AND WE ABSOLUTELY HATED THAT VERSION. I MEAN, IT WAS JUST GOD AWFUL” JULIAN EGGEBRECHT
machines,” says Julian, “because we finally had a dedicated graphics artist.”
This time around, the Amiga was the lead development platform rather than the C64. “That’s why it diverges here and there in the later stages quite a bit from the C64 version,” says Julian, “because Manfred couldn’t do some of the things that were possible on the Amiga.” The level design was also a team effort, with input from Manfred, Andreas,
Holger and Julian, and Chris Huelsbeck returned to make what Julian declares is the “best soundtrack on the Amiga”.
But even though the first two Turrican games received critical adoration for their technical achievements and fast-paced gameplay, Julian says that sales were poor – something he puts down to lacklustre advertising and weak UK distribution on the part of Rainbow Arts, along with rampant piracy. “Pirated copies got around everywhere,” he says. “The frustrating thing is that especially on the Amiga version, Holger had spent an enormous amount of time on finding new compression schemes to expand the disk beyond what it was designed to do. So the retail version was all on one disk, but the pirates had to turn the game into two disks because only a professional replication house was able to replicate the disk format that we came up with. We hated the fact that everybody has played Turrican and Turrican II on the Amiga with pirated versions, because they had disk swaps.”
And to top it all off, Accolade’s console ports of Turrican II were even more of a
disappointment. The publisher had acquired the rights to make a game adaptation of the Jean-claude Van Damme movie Universal Soldier, so they ordered The Code Monkeys to reskin Turrican II to tie in with the film. Accordingly, the walking eyeballs were swapped for mini tanks and the steel dragon boss for Dolph Lundgren on the Mega Drive and Game Boy. “God, that was so bad,” opines Julian.
The release of Turrican II represented a parting of the ways. Julian left Rainbow Arts to fully join Factor 5 in Cologne, while Manfred returned to his hometown. Both now focused on developing Turrican for consoles.
Manfred started work on a NES version of Turrican, which was confusingly named
Super Turrican – the same name as the Super NES version, which was also released in 1993, even though it was a completely different game. Julian explains: “The way the name came about is because everything had to be super. We said, like, ‘Why the hell would you name a NES game Super?’ But Rainbow Arts or Imagineer, our distribution partner, they insisted on it. We all thought that was stupid.”
Unfortunately, Super Turrican ended up falling far short of its potential. “It’s kind of a sad story in a way,” says Julian. “It’s a cut-down version of Turrican – and really, severely cut down – which isn’t Manfred’s fault, because the crazy thing was Rainbow Arts was so cheap at the time.” Many NES games, like Super Mario Bros 3, used memory management controller
(MMC) chips to expand the capabilities of the console. But Julian says that Rainbow Arts refused to pay for an MMC chip for Super Turrican, meaning it was impossible for Manfred to recreate the full Turrican experience. “It’s amazing that he got it going at all,” says Julian, “if you know how little the stock NES can do.”
Meanwhile, Factor 5 had engineered Mega Drive and Super NES development kits. “We used our hardware guru,” says Julian, “who was working in the hardware department of the German Secret Service. And he had hardware analysers to basically reverse engineer stuff. So we took a Mega Drive and a SNES and gave them to our hardware guy, and six months’ later – POP – out come development kits. And since the statute of limitations has run [out], I can also say we started selling those to other developers: ours were better than the stock Nintendo one, and they were a hell of a lot cheaper!”
Dev kits in place, Factor 5 set about taking advantage of the Super NES’S graphical oomph, with Holger leading development. “Super Turrican was always meant to be a ‘best of’,” says Julian. “We wanted to do a mix of Turrican and Turrican II, using Mode 7 for a few effects.”
They designed the game with an eight-megabit cartridge in mind, but in late 1992, they received a bombshell from Rainbow Arts: the publisher would only offer them a four-megabit cart. Julian was outraged: “I mean, it was the year of Street Fighter II, where everybody else had moved on to 16 megabits. It was ridiculous.” By that point, Super Turrican clocked in at around six megabits, and the decision to go with a four-megabit cart meant ditching a bevy of material, which has only recently been reinstated with the Director’s Cut.
After years of doing ST ports, Thomas Engel finally got the chance to be the lead developer on Turrican III, aka Mega Turrican. The headline change for this game was the replacement of Turrican’s signature plasma beam with a multidirectional grapple, inspired by the whip-swinging in Super Castlevania IV. But implementing it without breaking the game proved a nightmare, says Julian: “The QA folks were able to get into nooks and crannies, and got stuck everywhere.”
The prototype for Turrican III was developed on the Amiga, but Rainbow Arts, alarmed by the decline of Commodore’s computer, decided that production should be switched to the Mega Drive. Luckily, the two machines both used a 68000 chip, so porting the prototype was relatively simple. Development on the Super NES and Mega Drive games went on concurrently throughout 1992.
Meanwhile, an Amiga version of
Turrican III was suddenly put back on the table. Chris Huelsbeck had left Rainbow
Arts in 1990 to form Kaiko with programmer Peter Thierolf and graphic artist Frank Matzke, and the studio released the beautiful Amiga shooter Apidya in 1992. But the firm was in financial trouble, and Julian notes there was “horrible infighting” among the trio. So Factor 5 brought Frank on board to do the graphics for Super Turrican and Mega Turrican, while Peter got in touch with Rainbow Arts to ask whether he could program an Amiga version of Turrican III. Despite nixing an
Amiga release, Rainbow Arts agreed, and Thomas sent across Mega Turrican code for Peter to port onto the Amiga.
Mega Turrican was almost complete by the end of 1992, but it wasn’t released until 1994 owing to protracted publisher problems.
“THE QA FOLKS WERE ABLE TO GET INTO NOOKS AND CRANNIES, AND GOT STUCK EVERYWHERE” JULIAN EGGEBRECHT
“Rainbow Arts couldn’t hack it, so at the end of the day we had to find a publisher ourselves,” says Julian. “We were talking to Konami, because we did Contra III and Animaniacs on the Game Boy, and for a while we were also slated to do Castlevania on the Genesis. And part of that larger deal was that they would publish Mega Turrican.” But the Japanese publisher had a problem with one particular level. Mega Turrican was mostly a mix between Japanese-style left-to-right shooting and more exploratory gameplay, but the second stage was almost entirely free-roaming, and Konami insisted it should be removed, worried that it wouldn’t sit well with Japanese and American sensibilities. Factor 5 took out the level, hiding it behind a code – but even so, the negotiations broke down, and Mega Turrican was eventually published by Data East.
Confusingly, even though it was finished after Mega Turrican, Turrican III on the Amiga actually came out first, in 1993. And because it wasn’t part of the contract negotiations with Konami, the cut second level remained intact on the Amiga – although otherwise the games were nigh-on identical. The Amiga game uses the same source code as the Mega Drive version, but because Peter didn’t have access to any of the Mega Drive’s fancy graphics hardware. “He had to figure out ways and means to actually simulate all of the different effects,” says Julian, “and he did a great job.” Both games also feature another banging soundtrack from Chris Huelsbeck, marking his first foray into FM music.
“RAINBOW ARTS COULDN’T HACK IT, SO AT THE END OF THE DAY WE HAD TO FIND A PUBLISHER OURSELVES” JULIAN EGGEBRECHT
The final game in the series was Super Turrican 2 on the SNES, and it marked a change of direction, says Julian. “We said, ‘Okay, why don’t we go all out?’ Why don’t we almost completely move away from the freewheeling designs, and actually try to do a very Japanese game throughout?” As such, Super Turrican 2 is a much more linear affair than previous entries, but it has some truly impressive visual effects, thanks in part to Factor 5 finally bagging a 16-megabit cart.
The focus on Mode 7 effects meant the free-roaming had to be reined in. “Whenever you want to do a lot with Mode 7, then you have to limit your game design to mostly a horizontal design, or only vertical,” explains Julian. In addition, the multidirectional grapple was turned into a simpler Bionic Commando-style arm, which could “still attach to everything, but it made it easier to handle and much more playable”, Julian says. Super Turrican 2 also saw Chris experimenting with an orchestral soundtrack for the first time.
But for Factor 5, the lustre of Turrican had faded by the time of Super Turrican 2’s release in 1995. “We were quite frankly a little bit sick of it,” says Julian, “and towards the end of it we had moved on because we were working with Konami on International Superstar Soccer Deluxe.” To cap it all off, Factor 5’s already fractious relationship with Rainbow Arts broke down completely. “They actually did an awful deal with Ocean,” says Julian. “And we ran over time, so Super Turrican 2 took about half a year longer than it was supposed to, so they claimed that we were in breach of contract and wanted to recoup the complete money that they paid to us for development.” The heated legal dispute marked a sad and premature end for the Turrican series.
But Rainbow Arts was eventually sold to THQ, and when THQ went bust in 2012, Factor 5 was able to acquire the rights to the Turrican games. This has culminated in the current re-releases (see ‘Upgrading Turrican’ on page 24’), and potentially an entirely new game (see ‘Turrican Returns?’ on the next page). The Machine may have been defeated multiple times, but it always finds a way to come back.